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For years, the U.S. government has been grappling with how to manage conflict prevention and stabilize crises and conflict-torn societies. Ongoing reforms at the U.S. Department of State include the transformation of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization into a new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. The mission of the new bureau is to advance U.S. national security by driving integrated, civilian-led efforts to prevent, respond to, and stabilize crises in priority states, creating conditions for long-term peace.

On April 17, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted Ambassador Rick Barton, the newly confirmed assistant secretary of state for Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Assistant Secretary Barton discussed his vision for the new bureau and the priorities on his agenda. Brookings Fellow Noam Unger provided introductory remarks and moderate the discussion.

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Over the past year the U.S. government has made significant commitments to improve foreign aid transparency through a new informational website and an action plan for the multilateral Open Government Partnership initiative. More recently, the Obama administration has announced its intent to join the International Aid Transparency Initiative, an effort to agree upon and employ standards for publishing information on aid spending. And controversial implementation decisions about new U.S. laws on conflict minerals and natural resource extraction present a pivotal moment for transparency and global development policy beyond aid.

On January 19, the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at Brookings and Publish What You Fund hosted a discussion of the 2011 Aid Transparency Index and explored the importance of transparency commitments and how they can be fulfilled. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, delivered keynote remarks, followed by a panel discussion with Karin Christiansen, director of Publish What You Fund; Daniel Kaufmann, Brookings senior fellow; and George Ingram, co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and chair of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. Brookings Fellow Noam Unger provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

After the program, speakers took audience questions.

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https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2011/11/28/busan-the-united-states-and-transparent-development-results/Busan, the United States and Transparent Development Resultshttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/181022898/0/brookingsrss/experts/ungern~Busan-the-United-States-and-Transparent-Development-Results/
Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.brookings.edu?p=48947&preview_id=48947

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Tomorrow marks the beginning of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea. The United States is attending with a particularly high power delegation, led by Secretary Clinton, to underscore U.S. leadership abroad on technical and political aspects of development policy. The U.S. government heads into the forum with a handful of priority themes, including country ownership, partnerships with the private business community and philanthropists, and transparency, sustainability and results. The United States seeks to be a leader in these areas and has the rhetoric to match, but much more needs to be done to connect the language of commitment to the reality of U.S. development activities. With the right balance of pressure and political space, the Busan forum may present the opportunity for the United States to step up its game, especially on transparency and results. In each of these areas, the United States can tangibly advance new tools for catalytic cooperation.

With regard to transparency, the United States is approaching a critical milestone. One year ago, the Obama administration unveiled its foreign assistance dashboard website and published the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which touted aid transparency as a key principle of high-impact development. Despite leading in other areas of transparency by pushing the Open Government Partnership into existence, for much of the past year progress on aid transparency seemed to have stalled. The dashboard was limited to a synthesis of previously available State Department and USAID budget and appropriation data in a user-friendly format and there was no progress on the promised expansion of the website to include multiple categories of data across all U.S. government agencies implementing foreign assistance. The 2011 Quality of Official Development Assistance assessment found that the United States ranked 12th out of 31 donors in the category of transparency and learning, which does not exactly correspond to leadership in these areas. This assessment is generally corroborated by Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Index.

But just last week, in anticipation of the forum new data was finally published to the dashboard to reflect information on planning, obligations and expenditures from the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation. This was a long-anticipated step since the MCC was designed to serve as a model of aid transparency and has consistently led in this area, by scoring the best, for example, among U.S. agencies in the Publish What You Fund index. To build on this momentum, the United States should publish a specific schedule for adding data from more agencies and categories to the dashboard in the way it was originally envisioned. That would bring the United States closer to a position of true leadership and make it into the largest provider of data consistent with the standards developed by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). In fact, there is even speculation that the United States might officially sign up to the IATI, which would be very welcome given that the United States has shaped these standards as an observer and already come close to substantial implementation, even without officially being an IATI signatory.

The United States also stands out in its commitment to a results-based focus in aid delivery, pioneered by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which was set up with an explicit framework for “measurable results”. The MCC approach starts with monitoring processes and outputs at the country level during its country selection and compact design phase, and then continues to track higher-level outcomes and impact as compacts mature. This approach is now being taken up by other development agencies, including the International Development Association (IDA), the concessional arm of the World Bank.

The IDA has proposed a new financing instrument called Program-For-Results (P4R) to indicate its commitment to the idea that development results are the key objectives, not just expanding the size of government spending in partner countries. The instrument is demand-driven and has strong country ownership because it supports programs designed by the countries themselves. Disbursements would be linked to achieving results. This puts a greater premium on transparency and accountability—no results, no aid—and helps transform the dialogue in a constructive way onto metrics of development and cost-effective means of delivery. The IDA is in a good position to push the envelope in this direction because it is ranked as the most transparent aid agency in the world. Of course, there are issues of information, control of resources, and environmental, social and program sustainability, and these would have to be closely monitored within the program. Like any innovation, lessons from the first operation would have to be systematically incorporated into future designs. For example, one important unknown is how best to strengthen the capacity of countries to prepare and monitor their own programs without undermining ownership.

The United States should support P4R and encourage other institutions to embrace the transparency and results agenda. The Busan forum calls for innovative approaches and new partnerships that can be aligned around a common results framework. If the U.S. can raise the profile of this agenda across the globe, it can reinforce its leadership position on development.

Over the past decade, many developing countries have experienced unprecedented economic growth that has left them more confident about their development trajectories, more assertive in articulating their needs for external assistance, and more capable of funding development from their own resources. Several of these countries are now simultaneously both recipients and providers of international development aid. But the reverse also holds for those developing countries that remain gripped in fragile and conflict situations, where none of the Millennium Development Goals have been achieved. So far, the international community has failed to provide an adequate solution for how these countries can be brought to stability. Meanwhile, the established club of advanced donor countries—a group directly affected by the ongoing financial and economic crisis—is heavily indebted and subject to strong financial and political pressures to cut budgets and development support.

Private philanthropic and civil society organizations have burst onto the development scene on a much greater scale than just a decade ago. Many international nongovernmental organizations have transformed themselves to mobilize resources for their own programs, giving them more independence from governmentfinanced projects. And multinational corporations are increasingly active in development as they do business, and find profit, in emerging markets. Each of these stakeholders must also contend with the pressures imposed by instant, technology-fueled global communications. Ours is an era of fast-moving change and exchange.

In certain respects, the global development community is awake to these shifting currents, which provide a popular topic for discussion and a motive for reforms. Yet both the pace and implications of change have been underestimated, and reforms to existing cooperation structures and activities are not keeping up. Widening gaps between international agendas and reality demonstrate that global development actors are struggling. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and other grand agreements from the past decade have taken years to negotiate, only to then age quickly in the face of rapidly changing contexts and ideas. As an example, it has taken more than a decade to reach—and operationalize—a global consensus to focus development support on low-income, stable countries. However, this framework is of little relevance in today’s world in which 90 percent of the global poor live in middle-income countries or in fragile states.

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The Arab Spring serves as another example of the failure of development cooperation to keep pace with the rapidly changing context in those countries. Government-to-government aid programs have proven ill-equipped to support development when recipient governments themselves are perceived as part of the problem of underdevelopment, rather than as part of the solution. Following political change, there is pressure on global development players to act quickly and responsibly—not least to make up for the shortcomings of their earlier engagement. Yet donors struggle to act without recourse to country-led development strategies that enjoy broad domestic consensus. In many of these countries, which have considerable domestic resources of their own, development cooperation does not revolve around aid, but requires the coherent application of non-aid instruments.

Clearly the process of reforms across the architecture of aid and development support must accelerate. If the relevance interval of global agreements has grown shorter, development actors should improve their ability to anticipate change and translate their ideas more quickly into action. Policy discussions on public-private partnerships, for example, still remain focused on the celebration of project-oriented deals after more than twenty years. What we need, however, is a wholesale shift to a new set of instruments that will enable larger-scale strategic programs.

The good news is that there is massive energy from millions of individuals around the world focused on tackling the challenges of development, which can help extract positive changes out of the present crucible of pressures. A key question is how to best harness that energy and coordinate connections and divisions of labor among the various elements of the modern development ecosystem. We convened the 2011 Brookings Blum Roundtable to address such questions and to discuss the state of global development cooperation, opportunities presented by international platforms for policy dialogue, the lessons of the Arab Spring, U.S. development policy reforms and the challenges of effective communications.

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Historic demand for United Nations peacekeeping has seen 120,000 peacekeepers deployed worldwide, managing crises from Lebanon to Darfur. UN political officers are currently assisting the new government in Libya and logisticians are backing up African Union troops in Somalia. But while crises from Haiti to Sudan underline the critical role of these operations, increasing budgetary and political pressures, and questions about the role and impact of peacekeeping, are adding complexity to policy debates about reform.

On October 18, the Managing Global Order project a Brookings and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement hosted a discussion on peacekeeping featuring Anthony Banbury, UN assistant secretary general for field support, Stimson Center Senior Associate William Durch and Brookings Fellow Noam Unger, policy director for the foreign assistance reform project. The panelists discussed ways in which the United Nations is responding to pressures for reform of its peacekeeping operations and how financial and political challenges could reshape the organization. Senior Fellow Bruce Jones, director of the Managing Global Order project, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just announced that she will attend the upcoming High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Although this event will be the fourth such forum – following on Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008) – it will be the first time the U.S. is represented at such a high level.

We view Clinton’s attendance as a positive step, having made the case for it privately in meetings and openly in publications (see our policy paper and this recent brief). But how does her attendance fit into the context of reforms to elevate global development within the U.S. government? And how can her participation lead to a better High-Level Forum? Here are some of our thoughts:

The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), issued at the end of 2010, focused in part on how the State Department can play a role in elevating development within U.S. foreign policy. It explicitly states:

“Elevating development as a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy requires not just rebuilding USAID into the world’s premier development institution, but also transforming the Department of State to support development. Secretary Clinton recognizes that while diplomacy and development are each critical in their own right, when they work together they are the basis on unrivaled civilian power to advance U.S. interests. For too long, however, the Department of State has not always been a willing and capable partner for USAID in supporting the development pillar of our foreign policy.”

The review goes on to note that State should systematically use diplomacy to advance development by negotiating and promoting international policy agreements in the context of multilateral forums in a way that complements USAID rather than treading on that agency’s expertise.

The transformation of the State Department to better support development makes many development assistance advocates and close observers nervous about further absorption and instrumentalization of operational assistance programming into the toolkit of diplomacy. The construct of the three “D’s” – development, diplomacy and defense – as distinct pillars of U.S. national security and foreign policy can quickly morph into a two-dimensional frame that blurs diplomacy and development while setting them apart from military efforts. Given USAID’s recent history of eroded independence, this is a legitimate concern especially with regard to increased roles for the State Department in operational aid programs and aid budget management.

But there are many ways the State Department can support development by drawing on its comparative advantages. For example, in conflict-affected states where an international military presence is required, State can use its expertise and influence with other departments, governments and international organizations to shape coherent stabilization efforts that are conducive to development.

A more obvious comparative advantage is the international prominence of the Secretary of State, which should be put to good use in Busan. So while USAID should naturally continue to lead in shaping U.S. positions for Busan— after all it’s a global development conference — Clinton’s participation should enable the U.S. to leverage her unique profile on the global stage. As one of us previously noted in reference to the OECD ministerial meeting in May 2011, “Secretary Clinton must continually use development diplomacy opportunities to empower USAID and its administrator, Rajiv Shah, in the eyes of other U.S. government and international officials. Secretary Clinton is certainly capable of using her star power in this way, but will she?”

With regard to the High-Level Forum itself, Secretary Clinton’s commitment to attend is already serving as a game-changer that could snatch a politically meaningful result from the jaws of an otherwise technocratic aid conference. Six years ago in Paris, at an earlier conference on aid effectiveness, rich countries committed themselves to make changes in the way they delivered aid to improve its impact. They have made some progress on this and the efforts are contributing to better development results, but the pace has been slow. As panelists at a recent Brookings conference argued, this is mostly because the necessary improvements in aid delivery require tough political support. In essence, the reforms would transfer more control over resources to beneficiaries in return for greater accountability on results. Persuading Congress and the public that that is a sensible approach to improving the “bang-for-the-buck” for U.S. taxpayers is essentially a political issue.

Busan will be a political event in other ways as well. There are now many international forums that deal with development in overlapping ways, including the United Nations and the G-20, and many more providers of development cooperation, including China and other emerging economies. Busan must reposition the aid industry to work better in this environment, taking the discussions beyond aid into a more systematic “development effectiveness” agenda. The attendance of Secretary Clinton, and the other foreign ministers who will now be encouraged to attend, can signal that this repositioning is underway. Maybe then new forms of aid partnerships can be built, including with the private sector, so that aid and other instruments of development cooperation can catalyze and accelerate improved living standards in the poorest parts of the world.

Lastly, as one of the world’s strongest voices on greater investment in women and girls, Secretary Clinton’s participation provides a new opportunity to add a focus on gender to the development agenda at Busan.

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In today’s cost-cutting budget environment, efforts to reform U.S. foreign assistance programs to better support development outcomes have become more important than ever. What are the main opportunities and challenges as the U.S. aid architecture seeks to adapt to a changing global environment? How can better aid management and cooperation support these goals? The Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducts periodic peer reviews of member countries to answer these questions. The peer review focuses on helping countries understand areas for improvements in development strategy and structure, as well as identify and share best practices.

On July 28, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and the OECD hosted a discussion on the recently completed peer review of the United States. J. Brian Atwood, chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, provided an overview of the peer review’s findings. Following his remarks, panelists including Donald Steinberg, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Senior Fellow Homi Kharas, deputy director of Global Economy and Development at Brookings, and Connie Veillette, director of the Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance Program at the Center for Global Development, discussed the review process and its conclusions in the context of ongoing reforms. Fellow Noam Unger, policy director of the Foreign Assistance Reform Project at Brookings, moderated the discussion.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will chair the upcoming Ministerial Council Meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and analysts interested in global development policy may want to pay close attention.

This year’s event, structured around the theme “Better Policies for Better Lives,” marks the 50th anniversary of the OECD. According to a preview by Under Secretary of State Robert D. Hormats, Secretary Clinton’s participation will be centered on a discussion of new paradigms for development. As Ambassador Richard A. Boucher (Deputy Secretary-General of the OECD) noted in the same briefing, “development is big on the agenda.”

Armed with President Obama’s policy directive on global development (see commentary) and the findings of her own Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (more commentary), it is no surprise that Secretary Clinton is focusing on development. But what should we look for? A number of items come to mind and they fall into the following four categories:

Emphasis beyond traditional aid: Apparently Secretary Clinton is planning to lay out a detailed vision that is meant to “expand the discussion from aid effectiveness to development effectiveness.” This is an important step since the U.S. and other countries trying to support sustainable development must establish more coherent approaches across a wide array of policy areas that impact development, like trade, agriculture, investment, energy, military security and migration. As I noted in a recent paper with my colleague, Homi Kharas, incoherent policies are characterized by counterproductive efforts and by missed opportunities for synergy. The coordination necessary to surmount the problem requires strong political will.

This broader approach to development is directly in line with President Obama’s policy directive on global development, which calls for a modern organizational architecture that enables greater policy coherence across the U.S. government. Since the announcement of the president’s directive in September 2010, however, much of the momentum on reform has remained focused on aid. The administration has rather quietly referenced the “Partnership for Growth,” which is intended to be a broader, more coordinated approach to supporting development in some countries, but details are lacking. Big changes take time but there has been little if any public elaboration on some of the initiatives announced in the presidential directive that could help with coherence beyond the State Department and USAID. These include the formulation of a presidentially-approved U.S. Global Development Strategy, robust assessments to determine the impact of all relevant policy decisions on development investments and outcomes, or even the creation of a U.S. Global Development Council that could be mandated to advise the president on practical steps to promote policy coherence across agencies. Perhaps the OECD ministerial meeting will mark a turning point by announcing concrete steps that draw upon the full range of U.S. instruments to promote development, including efforts through which aid can be more catalytic.

Secretary Clinton is expected to highlight the issue of promoting domestic financing for development through more effective tax systems in partner countries. The U.S. appetite to push this approach was foreshadowed by President Obama’s recent trip to El Salvador, where he and President Mauricio Funes endorsed plans to pilot a “new DF4D program, which will assist countries to mobilize domestic resources by improving public tax administration.” Secretary Clinton has also publicly hinted at the value of such an approach in the case of Pakistan.

Promotion of accountability and transparency: The emphasis on domestic financing in developing countries ties into efforts to reduce corruption and strengthen accountability. Support for the establishment of fair tax collection systems also presents a good opportunity to link donor aid transparency and the importance of transparent budgeting and spending by governments of developing countries. If members of the U.S. delegation do talk about this connection in the context of mutual accountability, expect them to also reference the new U.S. Foreign Assistance Dashboard as an example of the Obama administration’s commitment to aid transparency and accountability to both U.S. taxpayers and aid beneficiaries. The dashboard should, of course, be even more impressive as it develops and fulfills its potential.

Framing USAID’s role: In talking about development policy on the international stage, Secretary Clinton has to navigate the tension between using her platform to promote more coherent initiatives and making it appear like the State Department operates all the relevant moving parts of the U.S. government. Secretary Clinton should shine a light on other agencies of the U.S. government, and this is especially true for the U.S. Agency for International Development. President Obama’s policy directive includes an explicit “commitment to rebuilding USAID as the U.S. government’s lead development agency,” and Secretary Clinton must continually use development diplomacy opportunities to empower USAID and its administrator, Rajiv Shah, in the eyes of other U.S. government and international officials. Secretary Clinton is certainly capable of using her star power in this way, but will she?

Agenda setting for international development cooperation: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the OECD, Secretary Clinton and the U.S. delegation are likely to mount a forceful defense of multilateral partnership. This is not to say multilateralism will be under attack at the ministerial meeting – quite the opposite! But with regard to development assistance, most official development donors have swung toward bilateralism in recent years, decreasing the share of aid that they channel through core funding for multilateral agencies. The U.S. presents an extreme example: cutting its share of development assistance channeled through multilateral organizations by more than half over the past decade. While a dramatic reversal of this budgetary trend is unrealistic in Washington’s current political climate, the Obama administration has taken steps to embrace multilateral efforts to promote more effective development. This has been evident in the G20, in the serious rather than dismissive treatment of the Millennium Development Goals and the principles of the Paris Declaration, and in the renewed enthusiasm of the U.S. to play a leadership role in the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD.

It will be interesting to see how Secretary Clinton and the U.S. delegation use the opportunity of the OECD ministerial meetings to lay the groundwork for future leadership on international development cooperation. Might the U.S. signal openness for a more merit-based approach to selecting the leaders of the IMF and the World Bank that could pave the way for others beyond Europe and the U.S., respectively, to fill these roles? During the week of the G8 summit in Deauville and one year before the U.S. hosts the G8 again, will Secretary Clinton note that the U.S. is looking more toward the G20 than the G8 as an appropriate forum in which to exert leadership on development effectiveness? Will Secretary Clinton up the ante of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness by announcing that she will also attend that meeting in Busan, Korea later this year?

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With little more than a half year left to prepare before a key international conference on aid effectiveness in Busan, Korea, policymakers must consider the answers to two key questions: what could success at this meeting look like? And what can be done in the preparation phase to maximize the chances of success?

The fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness will build on agreements from past years, but this time the discussions are taking place in a markedly different context. In the face of heightened pressures on international aid, the meetings in Busan at the end of the year present an opportunity to finally take development cooperation seriously. The U.S. government in particular could play a critical and catalytic role.

Context
The 2011 High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan is different from the preceding forums in Rome (2003), Paris (2005) and Accra (2008). It must directly contend with a particularly complex mixture of factors. Some are new and some have simply grown too big to ignore, but all are actively mounting pressure on an essential yet weak system of international development support in need of reform:

First, budget difficulties in the traditional donor countries that provide major development support likely mark the end of an era of growing official aid budgets. Surveys by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD/DAC) suggest that aid growth will slow to just two percent a year from 2011 to 2013. Consequently there is a search to leverage aid with other resources and strategies for development. With tighter aid budgets, there is greater attention than ever before on improving the dysfunctional international aid architecture to make it more efficient, effective and accountable.

Second, newly prominent actors in development—from official partners like China to international NGOs to private corporations—have become large in financial terms, changing the nature of the aid landscape. While this phenomenon has been unfolding for years, the degree to which it is treated seriously in Busan will determine the relevance of the High Level Forum.

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When President Barack Obama launched a new U.S. global development policy last year to world leaders assembled at the United Nations, he said, “Put simply, the United States is changing the way we do business.” He also stated that supporting development cannot be the work of governments alone, noting that “foundations, the private sector and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] are making historic commitments that have redefined what’s possible.” This is well supported by the fact that the vast majority of resource flows from the United States to developing countries now come directly from private individuals, organizations and companies rather than from the U.S. government.

Having recognized this dramatic shift, and in an effort to nurture greater policy coherence across the broad range of U.S. government agencies and instruments now engaged in promoting global development in various ways, in September 2010 the White House issued a presidential policy directive on global development announcing that it was creating the U.S. Global Development Council. The directive stipulated that this council would be “comprised of leading members of the philanthropic sector, private sector, academia, and civil society, to provide high-level input relevant to the work of United States Government agencies.” However, no further details about the council were provided when the directive was released, nor have there been any subsequent statements from the administration clarifying how the council will function and when it might be up and running. This paper therefore spells out some of the key considerations that should be addressed as the council moves from concept to reality.

Advisory boards and councils designed to guide the government in its work are legion in Washington. They range from the high profile and influential, such as the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee and the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, to the obscure, such as the Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries and the Flue Cured Tobacco Advisory Council. Advisory boards and councils can effectively steer the work of government in constructive ways, or they can serve as a delaying tactic to feign political concern in the absence of meaningful action. We offer these ideas and recommendations to spur a policy dialogue to enable the U.S. Global Development Council to emerge as an influential and steadily effective entity rather than one that fades into irrelevance and inaction.